Excursions

It’s been around a month since I started maintaining a bullet journal (BuJo, as it is called with love). It has been an enlightening month - I have learned so much about my habits and the way my mind works.

Of course, this wasn’t my first attempt at maintaining a journal or of planning myself, my life through an organizer. There have been many failed new year resolutions that have led to me buying, keeping and planning my days and months in the traditional journals - ones with days, months written on every page. With every day that I had failed to make an entry in, I had lost my interest in writing or planning another today. I just wasn’t organized enough each day, everyday to keep myself, well, organized.

However, I love, love updating my personal bullet journal daily. I believe the analog method of doing so is one big reason behind the change. Thoughts flow freely through the pen on to the paper — a lot more so than they do digitally. There is something about the legibility (illegibility, to be fair) of the handwritten words that lowers some mental hurdles. I always wondered, and even subconsciously ridiculed, the fascination a section of my social circle had with the pen and paper - the pen addicts. But I do fathom the allure now.

The fact that I could be more organized with BuJo by being less organized at times was neat. The process of “maintaining” a journal feels a lot less formal and this casualness has done wonders for my journaling/organizing attempts. The whole concept of rapid logging - capturing thoughts as bulleted lists - worked brilliantly for me. It was ok to miss bullets for a day. It was ok to not have any tasks, but only notes for a day. It was ok to not complete tasks on the day, or even in the week that it was written — just migrate it to a new page. It’s perfect for my moody, erratic, unorganized mind.

A month of habit tracking has also been delightful. This is what I was tracking when I started this habit of tracking habits - morning walk/run, publish 100 words every day, measure weight, three meals a day and regular sleep routine.

And boy, have I learned stuff about what makes me carry through any habits. Some habits are easy, some are way too difficult.

• Habits that I thought would be a cakewalk to follow, turned out to be a walk in a desert. Those I thought would need more push from my side came just naturally.
• I had thought 100 words to be published daily would be the most difficult task for me to stick to. Three meals/morning walks would be difficult, but not so much. Nah ah. It is apparently easier for me to do things I enjoy doing (bruh, of course) - so I wrote daily more often than I jogged or controlled eating. However, I thoroughly enjoyed attempting to stick to all the three daily, so I plan to continue to track them.
• Measuring one’s weight daily does nothing but act as a deterrent when you are trying to lose your weight. It is easier to do, but useless. Anything that I shouldn’t be doing daily doesn’t need to be on the tracker.
• Maintaining regular sleep routine was something I did almost daily. But this tracking was also the most ineffective of the lot. I think I know the reason - I just wasn’t specific enough with my target. “Regular” and “routine” are subjective. So any sleep more than 7 hours was fine — didn’t matter if it was pleasant or how I felt when I woke up. I do want to sign myself up for a good sleep routine. So this particular item would need some changes.

With all the learnings, I decided to continue with my habit tracker, with some tweaking. This is what I would track as my daily habits for the next month.

• Rise by 6 AM
• Morning Walk/Run
• Morning Pages
• Publish 100 Words
• 3 Meals/day
• Sleep by 11 PM

Since I started maintaining a bullet journal, I have also started carrying along a small diary that I mainly use for the morning pages. It helps me declutter my mind to a limit. Do I see benefits? I believe it is too early to say. But it is something I do want to carry on.

It has been a wonderful month of reorganizing the way I lead my life with journals. Is it worth all the effort I have to go through? Only time will tell. But it for sure has made some aspects of my life more fun.

Too much has been happening for the last few weeks. I do not like this much happening.

For one, it completely ruins all the plans one has — one just doesn’t get a chance to think of anything. All he can do is to run amok trying to catch up. Plan? Bruhh! What plan? Run!

Second, the routine that you so diligently, so delicately have been following for some time now? Yeah, forget about that. Screw that. That’s going to go for a toss too. I haven’t been able to stick to a single routine. None. Nada.

And sure, I could have foreseen and planned for this spike in activity, right? Nope, not at all.

You can’t plan for events that haven’t been scheduled yet.

You can’t plan for the back to back birthdays you haven’t been invited to yet.

You can’t plan for friends and relatives remembering and visiting you after ages.

And you can’t plan for the sudden feeling of illness, of exhaustion this whole running around leaves you with.

Could I have avoided any of that? Did I not welcome any of what happened? No, of course not. But what I ended up doing is sit alone at my desk, physically and mentally sick and tired, trying to calm things down. To Breathe.

Because there’s no way to plan against the unplanned, against irregularity.

What is silence? Is it the lack of any sound or is it the lack of any discernible sound? What do you need to attain calmness?

Today, I sat alone, reading for around an hour - time that I was the most focused in a very long time. I felt I was alone, I physically wasn’t. I realised this only once I was out of my trance.

I was surrounded by a persistent hustle-bustle of the regularities of a working day. People chattering over a cup of coffee. Muffled, at the same time distinctly recognisable, voices of the labourers working outside the window. Rambles of the passing trains every now and then.

There was a lot of sound, a lot of noise around me. But there was silence within - I have come to realise it works way better to calm one down than the silence outside.

Patience is a virtue that is rapidly getting extinct within us. Everything digital has trained us to expect everything instant. You want to read, watch, listen to, learn, earn? There’s an app for that.

We were ruined, further, by the advances in efficient service distribution at scale. You need things delivered - there’s a service for that. Groceries? Yeah, those are covered. Food? Cab? Stationery? Yep, we got those covered too.

Services would reach you earlier after a week or more, if at all they could reach you. It became days. One day was a stretch goal that was soon met for many. And next was hours. For many services, it is minutes now. 30 minutes or free.

We have all been ruined by this promise of “instant”. A detour of 15 minutes before the food is delivered is worthy of a lengthy rant at the service provider now. A delay of a day before one’s headphone is delivered is intolerable.

Days of patiently waiting for things we need, we want have long been lost. We are ruined by our lack of patience.

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Martin Weigert has an interesting take on this - this is what he wrote while sharing this essay as part if his weekly newsletter at Meshed Soceity.

(…) there are at least 2 types of patience: Waiting for the pay offs of one’s work (whether on oneself or external projects), and waiting for things one needs. I consider the first type a virtue. The latter type however, seems to be mostly a mental hack to make a virtue out of necessity. Have to wait for 4 hours to get your 5 minutes at the doctor? Be patient! Have to wait one week to get the thing you bought online? Be patient! Have to wait one day until your bank transfer has been processed? Be patient! In these cases, there is nothing inherently virtuous or positive in waiting.

I do not disagree with any part of this. And I was indeed focused on the second type that he talked about because that’s primary what he face more often and so is what that tests us the most. It is important that we do not lose our sanity if things do go wrong while we wait for things and have to wait longer.

I have lately felt hindered by the time I am listening to the same repetitive thoughts from other people on podcasts. Experts talking about, dissecting, the tech news. Or blabbering about something I would not be interested in typically.

I realised it had become a problem when these podcasts kept playing as static noise in the background — irrespective of whether I was working or driving or eating breakfast. In that sense, I agree with CGP Grey’s thoughts on podcasts as he dialled down his consumption on the internet.

But podcasts have taken too much ground in my mind: any moment of idleness can be instantly filled with the thoughts of others.

I firmly believe that boredom is good for brain health, and I’m banishing podcasts for the month from my phone to bring boredom back into my life.

I had cut back on my podcast subscriptions just a week before CGP Grey first talked about his experiment on Hello Internet. And the way, he worded his reasons for why giving up on podcasts was a key part of his experiment to reduction just persuaded me to go ahead with my plan.

So I have 10 subscriptions (down from 35) now, with just 3 technology related podcasts. One releases on Monday, another on Wednesday and the last one on Friday. That’s it, the week’s quota of the technology news is covered. One podcasts is a microcast, arrives on Monday. There four are the only ones that are set to auto-downloads. All the remaining 6 are released without any fixed schedule. I decide whether to listen to them only after I read what they are about and if that interests me.

I have been on this “diet plan” of podcasts consumption for at least a month now and I am already observing significant differences. I am listening to music, a lot more, again. My mind has become curious again - there is space for some thought experiments. There are times when I just don’t carry my headphones with me even when I am going to places alone. Anyway, with nothing to listen to, there is no incentive to carry them along. So I either read on my phone or just talk to people around. Surprisingly, I find it a lot better, more effective use of the time.

However, this also means I have some time to fill during my drive to office or the morning/evening runs. To address that, I have renewed my Audible subscription — listening to Audiobooks would at least be better than podcasts. Or so I think, for now.

No-news Experiment

I was also on an experiment 3 months back where I had decided that the only way I would consume news would be via my morning newspaper. And my hypothesis was I would feel a lot less burdened to know what’s going on and so be a bit more focused on the work at the hand.

As an extension, I had also uninstalled all the related apps. No Twitter. No news apps. No notifications from social apps (Messages, WhatsApp). The idea was it is just better to stay away from the temptation to check what’s going on.

I am glad that I have following the set rules for 3 months now and I thought it would be right moment to update on that experiment.

It indeed is a not less burdensome to be away from the news. I do not think I have missed anything major or urgent in these last few months. Newspaper provides me with the detailed reporting and not just blurbs. Opinion pieces provide better context on the important ones. The useless news, whose whole purpose is to satisfy the need for the news website or TV channels to keep “reporting” something, anything new, get filtered out by the editors. After all, there is a limited pace to fill in the pages on the printed paper.

So I am no longer bludgeoned with a constant stream of everything that’s negative. With that, I think there is a lot less crap in the world than I was made to believe.

Is it bad out there? Sure. But at least I ain’t bogged down by the insignificant drivel that the world is full of.

There is a fascinating conversation on episode 97 of the Criminal podcast with the now 99 year old Benjamin Ferencz. He primarily talks about his experiences as an investigator of Nazi war crimes after the World War II. There are some gut-wrenching stories about the atrocities he witnessed against Jews, and against humanity. He also shares his experiences of his trial against the “high-ranking members of Nazi Germany’s death squad”, a trial that he called “the plea of humanity to the law”.

But towards the end of the episode, there is this heart-warming tale from Mr. Ferencz. He talks about his wife who is 5 years older than him; whom he has been married to for last 72 years; whom he had never had a quarrel with. And he believes there is a very simple reason for that.

“First of all, I am not suggesting we didn’t have differences of opinion. But we never raised our voice. We never shouted. We never pounded a table. Because it’s mutual respect, and caring for each other. They have a funny word for it that I don’t like - love. I don’t like the word. Because you could love a piece of cheese, you love that lovely day. I could love to go home. I would love to finish this interview. And I say if you say caring for somebody, that reflects better. And my wife now needs my care. This is the pay back time.”

Now and again, it helps to keep things simple - I guess experience must imbue you with such clarity of thoughts. From all the myriad of swanky adulations for the word and the feeling of “love”, I would prefer the simplicity of “caring for somebody”.

It is raining outside, a steady fall of cheerful drops. I look outside, while am gathering my thoughts, again. Rains always make me do that. Especially such.

Cheerful the droplets sound, together. This sound beat is no less than a pleasant sufi composition to my ears. It always cheers me up. It is doing the same to me now too. It's affecting the plans I have for the evening. But I do not feel saddened. Plans can be remade. Such rains are rare.

I adore such rains that have a knack of showmanship. They lead with a thorough built-up.

Elaborate gathering of the hazy clouds in the sky. Gradual darkening of the surroundings. Disjointed, but equally systematic, flashes of lightenings filling the skies. Followed so aptly by a symphony of angered rumbles. Unhurried arrival of tiny droplets. And the final showdown with the downpour. Show doesn't end. Post-climactic spans of the gleeful nature leaves one mesmerised.

Today's is one such showman. It, indeed, has left me mesmerised. Rejuvenated!

One's subconscious wakes up pretty frequently, at times during events not that significant in grand scheme of things. This was one such incident.

It was raining outside. I was, however, in a rush to come out of the building. I had already gotten late to leave my desk. Not that I had a bus to catch; rather I had buses to miss. I had to hit the road before the swarm of office shuttles poured on to the roads. That was my best, may be the only, chance to reach home unflustered.

I was trotting along the road, with my mind preoccupied with the thought to reach the parking lot sooner. Shall I take a straight route to the parking lot with just a turn or one with many arcs and twists? I had already started hustling on the straight route.

I, then, felt an itch on my left hand, just beneath the watch I was wearing.

I removed the watch and held it. I was lost for a moment, looking for a replacement place for the watch to reside. I realised I could wear it on my right wrist too and I went ahead to strap it there.

But my subconscious mind, fast asleep till then, woke up making me aware about what I was doing. That is when it dawned on me.

I never wear a watch on my right hand. Never.

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The incident got me thinking why was it so? Why was it that strapping a watch on the right hand was such a taboo for me? When did I decide it should always be on the left hand? I looked around me, none of the people had the watch on their right hand. None. No one.

I could come up with some quick answers as to why that might be the case. But I was not after a particular, rational, answer. I was curious about the pre-programmed behaviour of mine that makes me do, without much thinking, many of the chores I regularly do.

I knew there would be a lot of such wired decisions I keep making, and I went on to identify some of those. It didn't take much time for me to compile the list.

• I prefer even numbers, for any and every thing. Counting, stop-watch, timer, alarm, volume rocker. Every number settles on an even number.
• I hate characters, in alphabet, with pointy triangles in them. V, N, Z. I hate them.
• I prefer path which is straight, with lesser turns, even if longer.
• I pick a pen up when I want to note down something closer to my heart, for reasons I wrote about earlier.
• And many more..

The alternatives just don't feel right to me. Rather I do not even think about or look out for the alternative.

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I might assign reasons, possibly scientific too, to each one of them. But I would go back to doing the things, liking them or hating them, just the way I am programmed to do.

And I feel every one of us, if he or she decides, could come up with one such list. All we need to do is keep our mind open and question.

One might wonder what would he/she gain from the exercise? Well, it is good to know the always-awake, the conscious, subconscious is looking over, making small decisions for you, always.

These days i am going through some wonderful experiences. Major chunk for this: I have the routine in Bangalore broken. I was fed up with the same life style. Same road. Same bus. Same timings. Same place. Same updates. Same people. And even same dogs!

Life at Australia has given me that chance to break the shackles with usuality. The life has changed and so have people, places around me. I am not a pleasure freak. The only thing I ask for is the change. For that matter I do not even mind spending my days at a village as long as I get a break from usual casualties of life.

Casualties they are. Each moment each day life throws loads and loads of experiences at you. Some are feather soft. Providing you with the feel-good comfort in its zone. And then there are those emotion laden heavy experiences trying to crush you under it’s weight. Casualties to your mind is what they can leave behind. And casualties is what they leave behind.

So the break was indeed welcome. It has indeed been welcome. For the better part of this change is the feeling of differentness. But this same “differentness" is what pops up in between; a small compartment in mind still calls out for those same buses. Those same roads. Those same people. And those same dogs. In between some times a thought does crawl in the mind; a thought calling out for those “usualities”. Calling out loud for the sameness in the life.

Incidents wait for a perfect time to pounce on you, especially the bad ones. One such incident pounced on him too. One fine morning, it was.

Alike any normal day, he woke fully throttled up, with a hope for fruitful work at office. He rushed through the daily chores, preparing himself for the regular grinding sessions. However there was a tinge of excitement within him today. Surprised as he was with his full on enthu to reach office, a thought brushed his mind, ” something new, something good is about to happen today”. He knew today was, in someway, special.

He jumped into the office bus, just to get further surprised. Usually crowded, the bus welcomed him today to free spaces. He chose the best among the window seats. Clouds had already swarmed the Bangalore skies, further elevating his pleasant mood. “Something is surely in the air today”, he thought.

Whole day he yearned for the change he was sensing from the morning. However except for the persistent clouds, nothing indeed was pleasing him. He had a pretty workless day, which he hardly abhorred. But something was missing. He knew that, he felt that.

And then, on the verge of he giving up on any hope for the welcome change, it loomed, loomed through the hazy weather. He was introduced to the One. He was informed that One would be bossing him now onwards. The first few sentences from the One and he knew this was the change he has been desiring for. Fully impressed he was with the One’s fluent and vast knowledge flow. Fully impressed he was with the One’s sensitiveness for a person’s goals. Fully impressed he was with the One’s clarity of thoughts. Fully impressed he was with the One.

Few chats later an invitation was thrown at him, ” Join me for a smoke. Will you?” And that is how it all started. The incident had pounced on him, he though remained unaware. It all started one morning, one fine morning…

PS: All character are fictitious, resemblance to anyone is completely coincidental.